Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Google is lying to you with their activity controls
9 points by zuckdrink 2993 days ago
I use this to stop Google from tracking me https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity , I just did this to see what information Google is gathering on me. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout. As it turns out they don't match and Google is lying to us all.

To start I keep my Google Gmail clean and the "All Mail" box continually empty. But turns out Google has kept my email for the last 6 months without my permission. I have already requested that it be deleted thought their online tools and all my mailboxes show empty.

Moving on to browsing history I have all of my Google activity set not to track https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity , going to the site shows no activity. However looking though the logs that Google has sent me from https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout they have my complete browsing history for the last 12 months.

I am actually sickened by this as I go out of my way to protect my privacy and take all of the steps provided by Google to stop them from tracking everything I do. They are just straight up lying to people, it is disgusting.

If you have any Google account of any kind then the information they have on you could be a treasure trove, the damage someone could do to a public figure with this type of information would be huge.

2 comments

That takeout.google link you shared ..... I'm pretty sure that it is used to create an archive of your data. I'm also pretty sure making an archive will store your stuff with google.
If you actually did go out of your way to protect your privacy, step 1 would be not to use Gmail.
This is true , but I wanted to believe! so wanted to believe Google was making an honest effort for it's customers.